Sales in consumer electronics continue to increase at a steady pace. Estimates by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) have shown increases from around $107 billion in U.S. sales in 2003 to an estimate in U.S. sales of around 160 billion dollars in 2007. Consumer electronics sales include not only electronic equipment used in communications, and office productivity, but also electronic equipment used for entertainment. Such consumer electronic devices range therefore from calculators, printers, fax machines, and cameras, to mobile telephones, audio/video equipment, portable media players (PMPs), televisions, and personal computers.
At least some of this popularity may be due, at least in part, to the ease in which multimedia content may be readily, and often freely, accessed over the Internet from many different sources. Much of this content, however, is provided using the latest characteristics such as improved resolution, new encoding approaches, new methods for encryption, new network flow methods, the latest approaches to digital rights controls, and the sort. Unfortunately, not all of these new characteristics for the content are backward compatible. That is, an earlier configuration of a consumer electronics device may be unable to access and/or play at least some of the content configured with the newer characteristics.
A partial solution to this problem of device/content characteristic incompatibility is available for at least some consumer electronic devices, such as personal computers. For these select consumer electronic devices, when access is attempted for content having these newer characteristics, it may be possible to obtain tools needed to handle the new set of characteristics. For example, in the case of personal computers, it is not uncommon to download a new Compression/Decompression (CODEC) application, script, applet, program, plug-in, or other tool that is configured to handle the new characteristics. However, this solution is currently inadequate, since many of these tools are typically made available for only a subset of consumer electronic devices, and sometimes even only selected versions of those. For example, some of the tools may be available for personal computers having one operating system, but not for personal computers having a different operating system. Moreover, many consumer electronic devices may not have been configured to download and/or otherwise upgrade its configuration with such tools. For example, many televisions, set-top boxes, portable media players, and the like, may simply not be designed to be upgraded through this approach. Thus, many of these products remain unable to access content as it is revised and made available in newer formats and/or forms. Therefore, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.